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Published: July 11th 2008
That tiny thing over there is our plane?
Jono at La Paz airport about to get on a plane for Rurrenabaque.We spent most of our time in La Paz trying to find a responsible tour operator to go to the Bolivian Amazon basin with. La Paz is full of travel agencies and tour companies, and the more we read, the more disillusioned we became. Visiting the Amazon rainforest has been a childhood dream for me. I see it as a totally sacred place: home to the greatest biodiversity of flora and fauna in the world, and also one of the major sources of oxygen for the world. It is a living natural museum, that is being desecrated from all sides (Brazil, Peru and Bolivia) by big industry, poachers, hunters and loggers (both legal and illegal), and... us, tourists. While trying to find someone to go with, we heard stories of guides picking up anacondas, trapping and subsequently killing wildlife, just so tourists can hold the animals and have their photos taken, poking crocodiles with sticks, dumping rubbish and feeding monkeys. I was almost ready to just give up on the whole idea and not go at all, until we found the website of San Miguel del Bala: http://www.sanmigueldelbala.com/. We were thinking we would go as paying guests and then we noticed
It gets even smaller closer up!
Jono at La Paz airport about to get on a plane for Rurrenabaque. that they take volunteers for as little as ten days. Jono and I had both wanted to volunteer in South America somewhere but had not been organised enough to plan it. since most places need you for atleast a month, we were thinking we had left it too late. So, we sent this guys an email and they got back to us straight away! Breathing sighs of relief, we then went about trying to work out how to get there.
There were basically two options: you could fly (for about US$50), and be there in under two hours. Or, you could catch a local bus for a lot less and go down what is infamously known as the world´s most deadly road (the death road) and sit in a cramped bus with no toilets for over 20 hours. We did consider the bus at first, as we are still trying to save money, even more so now that we have spent so much more than our budget, but, a- we both need to use a toilet more frequently than once every 20 hours, b- Jono has very long legs and the idea of sitting with them folded into someone´s
and even smaller inside!
on the way to Rurrenabaque back for 20 hours was painful, and c-I did not want to die.
I asked one tour agent how often the bus slips off the road (the main reason it is deadly is that it is incredibly steep, narrow, windy, and for the most part unpaved). My exact words were ¨Do buses really slip off the road as regularly as people say?¨ ¨Yep¨ was his un sugar coated response. Then we asked about jeeps and whether they have a better safety track record. ¨mmm... not really. They just go faster. Just the other week one slipped off, killing all 8 Israeli´s inside.¨ Plus, a jeep is almost as much as flying, and you need to get it full of people before they will go, so no guarantee of when that will be. We had heard first hand from travellers that the bus was as scary and terrible as everyone says. You can look out the window and see air (and lots of it) under the bus tire where sections of the road are not even wide enough for the bus to squarely sit with all wheels. Because it does not stop, people either pee in the bus, or out
of the windows. If you have more dignity than that you can run out when it is picking up or dropping off, and squat in an alley or behind a building, hoping the bus does not leave without you. A lot of people get sick from the bends, and throw up, again, either inside or out the window... and the stories go on. So, the plane it was.
When we were walking towards our plane in the airport, I was shocked. It looked like a remote control toy plane. I had never been in a plane so tiny. From inside, you can see right into the cockpit where the pilots sit which was pretty cool, and scary at the same time. They are obviously not afraid of terrorists here, which is a nice change. Flying over the tall mountains of the Cordillera range (closer to them than I felt comfortable with) was pretty exciting, and the landing on a grass strip surrounded by jungle even more so.
Stepping off the plane onto the grass landing strip was surreal. Getting off planes always feels surreal to me. Being transported via the heavens from one world to another. The first
thing that hit me was the green. We had not seen much greenery for a long time. Closely followed by the deliciously muggy heat, the insects and the bird calls. Wow! The airport was a simple wooden hut painted in bright blue with fly mesh windows. Very cute. Rurrenabaque (the town that you fly into) is also a very cool town. Tropical and laid back. No one is in a rush. People saunter down the dirt or cobblestone streets wearing little clothing with thonged feet and big smiles. The traffic, mainly cycles and humming scooters, cruises slowly past as does the river. Even though at times you feel like you could be in a Queensland country town, at other times it is obviously a town in another country far away from home. As I was walking along the street on our first day in town for example, a cow head, complete with everything except skin and a body, was thrown down in the dirt right infront of me. It came from a meat truck ¨delivering¨ produce to a store. I guess I got in the way. Mental note: do not eat meat in this town.
We spent a night
which came first
the chicken, the egg or the leg? in town and the next day we went out to San Miguel Del Bala´s lodge. There is only one guy who speaks English that we are aware of, and he works in the office. He took us out there, introduced us, and then left. It occurred to me, as I watched him and the boat leave down the river, that we did not really know all that much about the place and were somewhat stranded, about a 20 minute boat ride down the river back to town. We spoke very little Spanish and they spoke very little English. Anything could happen to us, and no one would no any better for atleast two weeks. I quickly realised my trepidation was total silliness though.
The motto of the community is ¨nada es seguro, todo es posible´¨ (nothing is certain, everything is possible), and if you can cope with that philosophy, it is a great place to go. Don´t expect anything to be on time or anything to go to plan, but be open to what happens.
I am not going to go into a day by day encounter of our time there, but it was filled mainly with sanding
a bar in Rurrenabaque
It was a gringo bar, but a good one. Happy hour went for two hours and meant we could drink cocktails for about $1 under fake jungle with Jack Johnson tunes. mould off walls and cabins and punctuated by walks in the forest, sometimes on our own and sometimes tagging along behind a tour group. We also visited the community (about a 20 minute walk from the lodge) a couple of times. On one occasion we were menat to be going for a festiva to honour pachamuma, but it was put of because there was a local football match that ran over time! Instead we sat for nearly two hours in the community church, watching a few locals getting drunk on chicha, chewing coca and wondering what was going on. Nada es segura. I held back from taking photos of the kids in the community, but they were sooooo cute! And so many of them. I really liked that none of them asked us for lollies or money either. It would be great for the community if even half of the kids stay on and live here. With the money from tourism, hopefully a lot of them will have the chance to go to University, and chances are, I imagine, not all that many will want to return, so the longevity of the community (currently with a population of about 250)
is yet to be seen. It will be interesting. Basically the lodge has been set up as an eco tourism initiative to sustain the community and promote education about the environment and the Tacana culture. It is a community run eco lodge, which means that about 40 percent of the money raised goes to health, 30 percent to education, a certain percentage to general infrastructure and other needs. A certain amount is also distributed evenly to families each year in cash. Families also have the chance to earn incomes from working in the lodge and from selling their produce, crafts etc to tourists. It was great to be involved in such a great project, even for such a short time (ten days all up). Since the Lodge has been set up, the community has been able to get clean running drinking water, and set up a primary school, which is a great start.
The guides are all from the community and have grown up using the plants and animals and land. They know so much, it is amazing, and are so passionate about what they do. Walking through the forest with them you really get a picture of how
it is everything to them. Supermarket, hardware store, pharmacy and church. I only wish we knew more Spanish so we could have understood more. We got to go to the Madidi National Park with a group on one day and had a volunteer fluent in Spanish translate everything into English for the tourists, so that was good. We learnt a lot that day. Highlights included tracking and being tracked by wild native pigs. I also got to see one briefly. At first we were tracking them, as we could hear them approaching us from up river, making a sound like walking over cobblestones, which was infact the noise of them picking up these big seedpods and sucking out the insect larvae from them! As they got closer, we saw the leader of the pack. It looked a little like a normal domestic pig but had blacker skin and a thick spiky Mohawk of black hair down the ridge of its spine. It got a fright when it saw us though and ran back from where it came. We then heard lots of startled grunting and snorting. Obviously an emergency meeting of sorts. Our guide chose this point to tell us
making a living from kayaks and banana bread
This guy (originally, I am told, from the states) makes his living from renting kayaks and selling banana bread, then goes kayaking and fishing in the amazon forest in his spare time. What a life. that sometimes their response to danger was to all group together and stampede the intruder. Oh, and he guessed there were more than 100 of them. Great. We then waited for what seemed like a very long time with what seemed to me very loud breaths and heartbeats, while the noises started surrounding us on all sides, and the smell clouded over us. Oh my god, the smell. Like what you would expect 100 pigs to smell like, multiplied several times. We were told that this was their other response to danger - to fart. I will never forget that smell. We also got to see plenty of birds, spiders, ants, butterflies, monkeys and a strange squirrel type thing which I don't know the name for.
It was a totally amazing experience on all levels: to see the amazon rainforest and learn more about it, to see the Indigenous community and learn more about their culture (mainly Tacana people), to do some work for such a great cause and to have to speak Spanish the whole time. There were some challenges too associated with language and cultural differences. Even though it was great to ¨not be a tourist¨ for
early morning mist on the river Beni
on the way out to San Miguel del Bala a while, it was also hard sometimes to walk past the tourists in the beautiful big dining room with their beautiful big dinners and sit with the rest of the staff on benches and upturned boxes, huddled around a small desk in the kitchen to eat deep fried chicken carcasses. Sometimes we ate what the tourists ate (though with less veggies and smaller portions), and this food was great, but ... did you know that you can eat chicken ribs and legs and fish tails? We know now, but I don´t think we will be cooking them at home. I think I am going to be vegetarian again when I get home. We were glad to sit with the staff. We would have felt strange if they let us sit in the dining room while they huddled in the kitchen, but we could not understand why they did not just sit at their own table in the huge (and largely empty) dining room. We have noticed this a lot in Bolivia. People might have beautiful big clean hostels and restaurants with plenty of room, yet they still house their entire family in just one cramped little room, and eat crouched
Jono inside the common room
at San Miguel Del Bala. The room is built in the traditional Tacana way with palm and wood from the community. The type of palm they use for the rooves lasts 25 years, which is pretty impressive. around on the floor, or on benches. I guess they are comfortable with that lifestyle and used to it, even if they are making money, they see no need to change the way they live.
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lolo & fifi
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Lyers!
Hey amigos! Did you say that you saw pinks dolphins? We want to see the photo with dahna and the pink dolphin.... See you Cusco amigos...great choro trek in your company and very nice libanese dinner.